Summary of John Hare’s God's Call (Part 3)
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John Hare’s God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, & Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001): Part III, Prescriptivism
David Baggett
John Hare introduces prescriptivism as the first concession on the expressivist side of things. The representative discussed is John’s father R. M. Hare (RMH), a longtime professor at Oxford. RMH’s prescriptivism preserves the emotivist distinction between moral judgment and statement or assertion, but he insists that this distinction is consistent with the objectivity of moral judgment. It was important for RMH to find a way of talking about morality that allowed both disputes about questions of moral value and then rational agreement about them.
His idea was to hang on to the kind of objectivity that Immanuel Kant described. The idea is that the person making the moral judgment can abstract from any partiality towards herself, by eliminating all references to individuals, including herself, from the judgment. If moral judgments, like scientific laws, are always about a type of situation, then she is not allowed in making such a judgment to make essential reference to herself.
This is what Hare calls “the first expressivist concession,” that morality is objective in this Kantian way. RMH also emphasizes that moral judgment is prescriptive, expressing the will. He observes that not all utterances that have the surface grammar of assertions are in fact to be analyzed as such. He calls “descriptivism” the mistake of being misled by the surface grammar into thinking of evaluative judgment as a species of assertion.
Prescriptivism is helpfully seen as a response to Moore’s claim that goodness is indefinable. He thinks Moore did not see clearly what he needed to see about the word “goodness.” Namely, we use the word “good” to commend. To commend something is always to commend it for having certain characteristics, which give us what RMH calls the “criteria” of the judgment. RMH introduced into 20th century discussion the term “supervenience” to describe the relation between commending something and the facts on which the commending relies.
Value properties supervene on non-value properties and that means that things have their value properties because they have the non-value properties they do. For example, a strawberry is good because it is sweet. But the value property is not the same as the non-value property, and ascribing the second does not entail ascribing the first.
Now, prescriptions can conflict. If two people disagree about the criteria for goodness in strawberries, they can agree that a strawberry is sweet and disagree about whether it is good. Two people can make opposite prescriptions about the same subvening base.
Moreover, prescriptivism allows for the disputes to be rational. The prescriptivist account of moral judgment requires a kind of rational screening of what we are thinking of doing. We can think of this screening as required for endorsement from a particular vantage point, what Hare calls the position of the archangel, who has complete information and complete impartiality. It’s not that we in fact occupy this position, but this is the vantage point we are trying to approximate in making moral judgments. This is how we can be rational in our moral decisions. The archangel is a model of objectivity in the sense that the prescriptivist wants to preserve it.
